Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills. This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.
This week, we discuss one of the primary skills that define good managers: Decision Making. If people cannot make a decision, or consistently make bad decisions – they are bad managers, no matter what else they do. Let’s look at some ways to make good decisions instead!
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The Basics
Have you met bad managers? Well, of course you have – everyone has. There may be many reasons they are not good at their jobs; but it is very easy to picture bad managers who are dithering around decisions, constantly asking for more information or other people’s opinions. Then when a decision is made, it is too often a bad one, or is so often second-guessed that it becomes meaningless.
Instead of falling victim to this terrible fate, we will walk through some processes for making decisions in an effective way. No one single procedure will be right for every situation, but some basics will always be useful to you.
Formal Decision Making
This is the drawn-out process that you can follow when you have a big decision and some time to do it. When you do not have those, you can use pieces of this to abbreviate your own process.
- Define the problem
Sounds easy. It is not. Sometimes it will be blindingly obvious what decision you are trying to make. Should I terminate the guy who set fire to the rare book room now or after his arson arrest? Will story time kids prefer crafts with glitter or with crayons?
As we have discussed in other chapters – be clear and specific with what you are really deciding. In the glitter example, the real decision is probably bigger and has more elements: kid’s desire for fun, parent’s desire for non-glittery children, librarian’s desire for both fun and the ability to be clean – they all clash and overlap. Defining the real question may lead to some easy answers – or show how much information there is still to be learned.
- Identify surrounding issues
We have already begun to identify some of these. Also think about budget. How expensive is the glitter? Will you have to pay overtime to get it cleaned? Will glitter fun get covered by the local news, giving the library some great PR? Are the cheap no-name crayons made from a toxic substance, opening the library up to lawsuits? No need to get too fanciful here; but think through the situation and see what kinds of other issues will either enhance or detract from a solution.
- Develop alternative solutions
This is where you, and your team, think through the possible different ways you could resolve this decision. In our question, the potential solutions seem pretty clear-cut: crayons, glitter. But we have the potential confounding factors involved in any issue: What about both crayons AND glitter? What about neither? What would happen if we just canceled story time and instead took a hike on the nearby nature trail? Include all the potential alternatives here, so you can be sure you are going to be able to identify the best one.
This is definitely where having a team of people, or even one other person, will help the decision making. You are awesome, of course; but even trying to “think outside the box” will still result in you thinking like you. You are the sum of your knowledge and experiences, and they will pretty much always add up to the same things. Bringing in other people means you will increase the knowledge and experiences provided.
- Pick the best alternative
This one gets tricky when you think about it. You can spend time arguing over what “best” means in your particular situation. And you can have a bunch of potential alternatives you do not really like. Making decisions is much more fun when it involves deciding between a bunch of really great and fun things. If that were often the case, it would be lovely to be a manger. But instead it’s tough, and you will do things people don’t like, and get rid of things your patrons use, and it will all feel hard and bad. Hang in there. Pick the best one.
- Implement the decision
Whew. That was tough. But now we have the best (or least awful) alternative. Now put it into action! You do not want to waste the work you have already put together, so get in there and make some good things happen. Mobilize the team who helped you with the decision. Find new partners and friends. Organize a giant banner to be hung in front of the library. Or, just buy the glitter and be prepared for the results. Whatever your decision was: Now Do It.
- Set up an evaluation system; redo if necessary
We are doing things, it’s great. But is it great? I hear grumbles, but are they meaningful grumbles, or just general fussing? How do we know if this was a good decision? Just making one is a good step, but you want to figure out how to know whether this will work for you or not. So set up an assessment plan and be prepared to evaluate the decision. The world is not going to end if you made a bad decision. You will make a bad decision, you will choose the wrong one, things will be wrong. But hopefully if you are following along with this procedure, it will decrease the number of bad decisions you make. And you can remake the decisions. Let’s say you went with glitter over crayons. Now your Children’s department is covered with glitter, which can not be removed by any amount of effort, so glitter will be all over the place for months. And two parents called to complain their kids are now allergic to glitter, so they are never coming back to the library. And the whole thing was so exciting and noisy you got shut down by the police. Crayons probably would have been a better choice – and now you know for next time! Do not let yourself get too down over a poor decision; take the lessons there and move on to a better one next time.
Conclusion
Making decisions is an important part of being a manager; making good decisions is even better. Use the strategies we have walked through here, adapt them to fit your needs and those of your individual situation, and use other tools that work. The process is not as important as actually doing it, so dive in and make decisions – and feel confident doing it!
Join us next week to discuss our next topic: Planning. You will take your decision-making skills and start making good decisions for the future!
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